Recently, social network games (hereinafter referred to as social games), which are games provided using a Social Networking Service (SNS), are becoming more common with the spread of high-end portable terminals such as smartphones. A social game is a game in which a physical user operating a terminal controls, via a communication network, a virtual user that exists in a virtual space established by a game server to play a game online while communicating with another virtual user existing in the same virtual space.
For example, one of such type of social games may be a game in which, depending on an action of the virtual user or a story, a single story or scenario is established by combining a plurality of game parts such as a quest part, a battle part, a combination part, and a gacha part to constitute a single game. The quest part may be a game part in which the virtual user acting in response to the operation of the terminal by the physical user sequentially completes events assigned to the virtual user in a quest including a battle or a mission (e.g., see Japanese Laid-Open Patent Publication No. 2012-24248).
Japanese Laid-Open Patent Publication No. 2012-24248 discloses that when a quest, which is one of the game parts, is selected, the virtual user therein linearly selects and completes the events assigned to the virtual user in the relevant quest in a predetermined order. For example, the events assigned to the virtual user include engagement in a battle with an enemy that has appeared in a virtual space. In this type of battle, assistance of another virtual user is available.
In the configuration of the conventional quest part, a plurality of virtual positions are arranged in a single straight path, in other words, one-dimensionally, and a virtual user is placed at each of the positions. Since a plurality of virtual positions are arranged one dimensionally in the conventional quest part, the positional relationship between one virtual user and another is not addressed. For instance, when one virtual user requests assistance from another virtual user in an attack against an enemy during a battle, a candidate for assistance is randomly selected regardless of the positional relationship between the virtual users. It is desirable to expand images of virtual space settings in the aforementioned conventional quest part by building a positional relationship between virtual users, e.g., by allowing one virtual user to send an assistance request to another based on their positional relationship in a virtual space.
The present disclosure has been contrived based on the aforementioned disadvantages and it is an object of the present disclosure to provide a game server that can provide a realistic world of a virtual space by constructing a positional relationship between one virtual user and another that can exist at virtual positions therein, whereby an interest in the entire game is stimulated. Also, it is an object of the present disclosure to provide a game controlling method of controlling the progression of a game provided by the game server, a non-transitory computer-readable medium, and a game system.